


La Bete et La Belle

by icarus_chained



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Beauty and the Beast, Fairy Tales, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-22
Updated: 2012-05-22
Packaged: 2017-11-05 20:15:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/410569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Watching Tony move about his lab like a sorceror in an enchanted castle, Bruce has a thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Bete et La Belle

**Author's Note:**

> Small, random thing. But they do make a rather awesome reverse Beauty & Beast, no? Heh.

Tony’s lab was full of … things. Shining, gleaming things. Oily things. _Moving_ things. Things that whirred and beeped, and moved in interlocking loops across the floor in a bizarre facsimile of a waltz. Voices from the ceiling that snipped and snarked, disembodied and smug. Robot arms that held up offerings like hopeful children, and whirred in pleasure if they were accepted. 

Tony, moving through it, flashing sarcasm back to sourceless voices, directing the robotic ballet with snappy directions and flicks of his fingers, bumping casually at animate arms that seemed to have far more personality than they should, looked less the scientist, to Bruce, and more the sorceror, the enchanter in his lair, his heart glowing with witchlight.

Stark Tower, in short, was proving less like Candyland, and more like …

He stopped. Froze dead in Tony’s wake, stumbling a little against an (inanimate) table, and … curved into himself, helplessly, and laughed. Low and soft and … wrenched.

Tony turned immediately. Tony spun to him, eyes flashing first confusion, then concern, carefully batting Dummy’s arm to one side, and stepping towards him. Bruce shook his head hurriedly, wheezing a little, eyes creasing around tears that were, probably, of mirth.

“Bruce?” Tony asked, frowning, a hand coming up to flutter vaguely in the air in front of him. Not touching, but not from fear. More from … confusion, as though Tony, even still, wasn’t quite sure how to deal with people who weren’t metallic. “You okay there, buddy?”

Bruce shook his head, smiling helplessly up at him. “Sorry,” he said, rolling a hand sideways, dismissing, apologising. “I just … I had a thought, that’s all.”

Tony blinked at him. Curious, wary. Trying a small smile, with a look in his eyes like he wasn’t sure it was appropriate. “Anything you wanted to share with the class …?”

Bruce … hesitated, for a second. And then shook his head, his smile slipping up into the corners of his eyes, to sit there tiredly. “I was just thinking,” he said, quietly, and with a wealth of tired humour in his voice. “That if Stark Tower was like anything, it was like the Enchanted Castle. From Beauty and the Beast?” Full of animate inanimate objects, and voices from nowhere. No singing cutlery, yet, but possibly they just hadn’t gotten to them yet.

Tony blinked, a little. Looking around him, slightly bemused, at the curious whirs of robot arms, and the somehow amused silence from the invisible presence around them. Tony looked around him, and blinked, as if only now realising that he lived somewhere that was practically a fairy tale brought to life by Isaac Asimov.

Bruce, watching him, let his lips slip forward into a grin, dark and rueful. “I was thinking I felt like nothing so much as Belle,” he said, softly. With perhaps a darker, knowing edge. Because Belle had been a potential prisoner too, hadn’t she? Though Tony wasn’t his jailor. “And then …” 

He stopped, held silent for a long second. Watching Tony watching him, watching the confusion in the man’s eyes. Watching the part of the man that _honestly_ seemed not to understand the problem with that. The part of Tony that saw nothing wrong with that comparison. Yet.

“Then I realised,” he finished softly, “that that was possibly the most ironic thought I’d ever had.”

Because really. In what possible version of the story would anyone cast him as anything other than the beast?

And then … something flickered, in Tony’s eyes. Some dark, liquid thing, fathomless, that Bruce couldn’t touch at all. Something shifted, and for a second Tony _was_ something else, something hard and vast and furious, a sorceror with his castle spread around him.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tony told him, lightly, air over chasms. “I think you’d make a pretty good Beauty.” A small, dark grin. “And trust me. I wouldn’t make such a bad Beast, either.”

And maybe that should have come out like a threat, maybe that should have been a warning, but … Looking into the warm, dark thing in Tony’s eyes, Bruce for some reason felt it closer to a promise, and an acknowledgement. A whisper of the aegis he had come under.

Belle. Or Beast. Or both. The promise, light and low. Was not this place, this Castle, the one place in the world where they - either, or both - might be safe.

And after a second, looking up into Tony’s eyes and dark, confident grin … After a second, Bruce nodded.

And smiled.


End file.
